Chekhov’s Mistess

It’s not who you’re thinking, owing to a couple of my recent rants here, but to Annie Proulx. I wrote about the Short Story panel at the PEN World Voices Festival last week, dismissing in the end an unidentified woman who wanted to make her own statement on the form (rather than pose a question).

Here’s David Haglund on that event:

“Funny story: At the short stories event last week, after the readings and the panel discussion, there was a question and answer session. A woman strode to the microphone and lambasted the assumption, which she felt had been reiterated by some of the panelists that afternoon, that the short story is a less important form than the novel. She mentioned having some experience with the form, as well as with novels and films, but no one— including those on the panel and those who have written (quite thoughtfully, I might add) about the event— seemed to realize that the woman speaking was Annie Proulx. (In fact, as she walked past my row and back to her seat, a well-meaning audience member sitting by the aisle bucked her up with an encouraging, ‘Good job,’ which I thought was awfully nice.)”

I imagine modesty kept her from identifying herself, but her words would have carried greater weight had she done so, at least for me who has clearly been to way too many conferences.

p.s for more great pics, click on the one above which will take you to PEN’s Flickr pool.

I think I’m becoming intolerant. I’ve got more kids than I can count and I work more hours than are in a day, so if I keep venting on this site that is why.


I don’t know John O’Brien, but I love him. Why? Because he created Dalkey Archive Press and if there are any finer publishers it’s a very short list. But the man clearly has his head up his literary arse.

Writing on the Dalkey Archive Website he appears like St. Augustine in the book from where he took his company’s name blustering about how the “philistines” have taken a statistic on the lack of literary translations published in the U.S. – THREE PERCENT – and made a cause célébre on empty premise and to no effect.

O’Brien’s complaint as best I can tell is that he and his staff came up with some statistics and others are claiming the credit. He’s also angry over the groundswell of “hype” over translated works that risks obscuring quality art from trash.

I’m reminded of the native Brooklynites here where I live who decry the gentrification of their beloved brownstone neighborhoods (the ones who don’t own property are the more angry). The problem is they don’t seem to realize that there’s more to be gained by loving thy well dressed neighbor than resenting them just because they weren’t living there when your stoop was the narthex of a crack house.

If you don’t know, O’Brien’s been publishing literary translations for a long time (he was country before country was cool), so his feelings are probably justified. But he kills his argument, no matter how facetious, here:

“Translations have suddenly moved from their marginalized place in the American marketplace to now being treated by the philistines as something to be equated with ‘good literature.’ The logic is this, twisted and silly as it may be: the United States has become more and more isolated from other countries’ cultures; this isolation has contributed to the United States’ insistence that other countries’ social and political systems should be made to be like that of the United States; understanding other cultures will cause the United States to respect differences and, on the best of days, prevent the United States from mindlessly invading other countries; literary translations are the key to reversing America’s isolationism, thereby causing universal peace, understanding, and love. “

Just who are the philistines who believe this nonsense? I want to know so that I can explain to them that the key to universal peace is to get a McDonalds in every country in the world because we all know that no two countries with McDonalds in them go to war with one another. Forget about three percent, we’re talking Quarter Pounders!

So who is calling Mr. OBrien and company’s statistics their own? Esther Allen’s 2007 report “To be Translated or Not to Be Translated” published by PEN/IRL on the state of literary translation quotes directly from Context, Mr. O’Brien’s publication, and in fact discuss the methodology O’Brien claims as his own of using Publisher’s Weekly as a rough guide to translation. What Allen’s book says that O’Brien leaves out is that the German Book Office in New York (who may or may not have gotten the idea from the NEA who got it from O’Brien) did the Publisher’s Weekly study and confirmed its value (not speciousness as O’Brien would have us believe) by the editor of that publication’s claim that it reviews about 60% of all translated books submitted. That study shows that, lo-and-behold, about three percent of the titles reviewed in 2005 were translations.

What’s more is that 3% was a whopping gain over the previous year and the total was only 197 books! Even if the oft-quoted three percent was 100% wrong it’s still a number that says an awful lot about our culture and to my mind trying to improve it can only come to good, even if falling short of halting the military industrial complex in its tracks.

The big problem is that the philistines believe “Translations, de facto, are good because they ARE translations. And among translations, some are even better than others because of their country of origin.” True perhaps, but here in Amurika, one man’s trash is another man’s art. It’s not just from the foreigners where there’s a lack of differentiation, so I’d venture to guess the real culprit is our culture’s belief that a book’s publicity budget is in direct proportion to its quality.

The hype over literary translations could be traced in part back to a man who seems to have made it his mission to champion international literature, Chad Post, who just launched a publishing house called Open Letter and a Website named Three Percent. Looking at their ‘about’ statement there’s no mention of causing “universal peace,” just a good old desire of “maintaining a vibrant book culture… because “In this age of globalization, one of the best ways to preserve the uniqueness of cultures is through the translation and appreciation of international literary works.” Bravo to that and it doesn’t seem to be much different than Mr. O’Brien’s own stated aims: “I think that it’s of absolute importance that the literature and intellectual thought of the rest of the world be readily available in this country and that these be valued and respected. Otherwise, we become this strange, isolated country that survives only because it possesses the military and economic dominance that it does.” Indeed.

Having recently become a fan of Javier MarÍas and the ever so very hyped Roberto Bolaño (solely, I assure you my Manchego, because I’m enamored with Spain and Chile, not because the books are good), I’d say I’m a direct participant in the corruption of art and because I’m writing this post I guess I’m also part of the “nastiness” “directed at anyone who isn’t on board for the hype.” If this is the philistinism of which Mr. O’Brien speaks, then count me in because I’ll take our brand of philistinism any day over the atavism that will arise from barring the Barbarians at the Gate.

My last post about a poorly written review made me think about how book review sections are declining yet as far as I can tell there are plenty of interested readers and writers out there. A big part of that is economic of course, but I have to imagine that there’s some small part due to the absence of craft in a fair amount of book reviewing. In light of that, for no other purpose than to remind myself, this quote from John Updike:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation—at least one extended passage—of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending. (How astounded and indignant was I, when innocent, to find reviewers blabbing, and with the sublime inaccuracy of drunken lords reporting on a peasants’ revolt, all the turns of my suspenseful and surpriseful narrative! Most ironically, the only readers who approach a book as the author intends, unpolluted by pre-knowledge of the plot, are the detested reviewers themselves. And then, years later, the blessed fool who picks the volume at random from a library shelf.)

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author’s ouevre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it’s his and not yours?

I lifted these rules from a post by then National Book Critics Circle president John Freeman. I pasted them in the writing program I use as a reference or reminder. What I didn’t copy from Freeman’s post is the following, but it seems apt given the review I was just talking about:

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in an idealogical battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never (John Aldridge, Norman Podhoretz) try to put the author “in his place,” making him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation.

I wonder if the “vaguer sixth” rule was necessary in 1975 when Updike wrote that passage?

All in all we had 38 posts on the PEN festival this year at MetaxuCafé. As soon as I can grab another moment, I’ll post a few more things and maybe my own thoughts on Friday’s Three Musketeers event, but in the meantime, I wanted to share my favorite photo from the Festival. Mary’s shot of the ViewMaster presentation at the Believer event.

Jonathan Franzen recently had this to say about book critics:

“‘The most upsetting thing nowadays is the feeling that there’s no one out there responding intelligently to the text,’ he said. ‘So few people are actually doing serious criticism. It’s so snarky, it’s so ad hominem, it’s so black and white.’”

There’s much to be said about this, but soon after reading it I happen to see a review of Mark Sarvas’s novel Harry Revised in the New York Times Book Review and was amused at how well the review fit Franzen’s characterization.

One way to tell if a reviewer actually has something to say is to see how much space they devote to discussion and how much to description or folderol. Troy Patterson, a boob-tube critic for Slate, spends the first 330 or so pages of his 1024 word review describing the book (which wouldn’t be bad if he’d gone on to draw valid conclusions or make comparisons) and the last 200 pages (inexplicably) talking about blogging. So that’s half of the review devoted to something other than an actual discussion of the book.

Where he does exercise his critical powers he does so entirely without nuance:

“…it is as if Harry were a voodoo doll and his creator eager to wear out a gross of stickpins. The author jabs the hero’s side with ‘a stab of irritation,’ ‘an unexpectedly sharp stab of pain,’ ‘an involuntary stab of jealousy’ and a ‘stab of guilt as it blossoms into anger.’ Harry’s soul is battered by a ‘wave of anger,’ ‘waves of despair,’ ‘a sweaty wave of guilt, remorse and shame,’ a ‘wave of queasy self-loathing’ and, climactically, ‘a tsunami of loss.’”

Patterson never gives any extended quotes from Harry Revised but I’d gather that (besides Patterson’s aversion to the word “stab” in all its potential meaning) these descriptions must be close together in the text or some offense warranting such derision, because in and of themselves these phrases, spread across a 272 page book, indicate nothing.

It’s not clear whether Patterson takes issue with Sarvas’s use of the word “gambit” or his using it:

“I will grant you that these days, only chess players seem to use the word ‘gambit’ properly, but Harry is supposed to be infatuated with the game of kings. Other terms that the novelist is pretentious enough to use despite his not knowing their precise meanings include ‘enormity,’ ‘parameters,’ ‘jumper,’ ‘tortuous’ and ‘petty crime.’”

I am often shocked at the pretensiousness of using the word “parameters,” aren’t you?

To accuse a novelist of pretentiousness should be backed with some more damning evidence and I think it’s not only a signal of intellectual lameness (as in, is that the best you can come up with?) but also something of an emotional bent to the review. Could Patterson be omniscient enough to know that a novelist must share the feelings of his character? “Harry…appraises her naked body with a disgust that the author seems to share..”

And Look at the last very long paragraph devoted to blogging, a subject that has absolutely nothing to do with the novel. Patterson begins: “That you are reading a review of this novel in these pages is a testament to the author’s success as a blogger.” He then discusses Sarvas’s blog posts! This is entirely out of place and shocking (or perhaps not) to find in a review in one of the nation’s leading newspapers.

It must be obvious that any first novel that’s reviewed in the Times gets there because of publicity driven factors (among others, I’m sure), so why would Patterson even bother to say that at all and then devote 20% of his review to blogs and Sarvas’s blog posts?

Now, I have to imagine that an editor at the review read and approved that passage, so it must be true: Mark Sarvas’s book was reviewed in The New York Times Book Review because he has been a successful blogger. If the very Review in question signed off on it, it must be true. Hmmm. That sure does say a lot about New York Times Book Review, doesn’t it.

p.s. For the record, yes of course I’m acquainted with Mark, and indeed, that’s the only reason I happened upon the review because I don’t regularly read the NYTBR. But it was the rudeness of the review and its utter lack of intellect, and of course the amusing coincidence of proving Franzen’s point, that drove me to write, I assure you.

[cross-posted at the MetaxuCafé roundup of PEN World Voices Festival coverage.]

“Short Stories” was a discussion held at the Scandinavia House for the PEN World Voices festival of International Literature on Friday, May 2nd. The participants were Etgar Keret, Young-ha Kim, Ingo Schulze, and Abdourahman Waberi. The discussion was moderated by Radhika Jones.

If Radhika Jones, managing editor of The Paris Review, is the most elegant person at the PEN World Voices Festival, then Etgar Keret might be the least. That contrast could be representative of their writing as well, she of the refined literary journal, he of the “badly written good story” mold whose own work is often brutal and abruptly short. While there were many contrasts on this panel on the short story, with speakers from Korea, Djibouti, Germany and Israel, they all agreed, save one, that no matter the value of the form to the writer, the market barely acknowledges short stories.

Surprising everyone, Young-ha Kim told us, through his exuberant translator, that the short story has been the dominant form in Korea and that every year the papers publish prize winning stories on January 1st, making mastery of the form a significant factor in becoming known. Although now, he says, Korea is looking out more to the U.S. so the novel is becoming more important than in years past. Abdourahman Waberi said, reflecting on the French market, write whatever you want, “just put novel.” Keret uniquely described the situation in Israel were the short story form is unwelcome: “People live a fragmented reality,” he says, “they have to check the clock every hour to see if they can go home. They want to read epic stories to escape.” For his part, he says, every story he thinks will be an epic, but he gets to the second page and “it suddenly ends.”

But if there’s any truth to the much discussed demise of the short story, someone should tell the writers. Jones asserted that the short story is alive and well, and said her journal alone receives over 1,200 submissions per month. The best evidence of the health of the form is the terrific stories read by (or for) the writers here during the discussion. I had already read Keret’s haunting piece, “Hat Trick” and found it even more unsettling hearing it read by Keret himself with his thick Israeli accent. All of the stories read were odd, magical, haunting in a way, and varied; a perfect demonstration of the flexibility of the form and it’s potential for power (unfortunately they were out of Schulze’s book that his story came from, but he’s now on my ‘must read’ list).

I’ve long felt that Keret’s work is a window into the tension and ennui arising from the every day potential for violence in Israel, and the fact that he accomplishes that in such short gulps is indeed a testament to the short story form as well as his own writing (I got to tell him so after the event too, or actually, I told him that I find myself reading his work aloud, in which he replied that that is the highest compliment).

Fortunately, there was not too much time for questions at the end because this day’s event was no different than most where questions tend to be either banal (see Dorothy’s notes on the Three Musketeers event) or more about the questioners. One woman wanted to make a ‘statement’ about the short story, she being a writer herself, and another wanted to announce his own literary acquaintances without really making much of a question. It was an “advice to aspiring writers” question that got the panelists talking though, and Keret derided the idea of well crafted yet boring or “sterile” story epitomized often in The New Yorker. He said there “is no way to write a story. Think about the story and not how it’s formed.”

See also Aaron Hamburger’s impressions, Molly McQuade’s and Geoff Wisner’s.

The Crying of Lot 49 trumpet caught my eye yesterday walking down Court Street, so I checked out the Freebird Books blog when I got home. If I make it over (doubtful because I’ll be at the bouncy castles on Court street with my brood) I’ll report more, but this is just the sort of quirky thing Pynchon’s work inspires which makes him (and his fans) interesting. It’s today, the third at 3pm.


From Freebird Books:

Mark your calendars for the literary event of the season: Thomas Pynchon turns 71 and Freebird Books and greater Red Hook won’t let him forget it.

Join us for a backyard barbeque and fax-a-thon celebrating America’s greatest literary cipher. We’ll dine on foodstuffs famously vomited by Gravity’s Rainbow’s Tyrone Slothrop: burgers, homefries, chef’s salad with French dressing, Moxie, after-dinner mints, Clark bars, salted peanuts, and “the cherry from some Radcliffe girl’s old-fashioned.”

And yes, we’ll be faxing birthday greetings to the great elusive one via the miracle of outmoded techology. One fax per customer, please. Please check your Kakutani hate mail at the door.

What? You want more?! OK, OK, we’ll be screening a rarely-seen Italian documentary and giving away lots of foolish prizes.

[cross-posted at the MetaxuCafé roundup of PEN World Voices Festival coverage.]

Writing Genocide: a discussion between Christian Jungersen and Lieve Joris took place Thursday, May 1st at CUNY’s Elebash Recital Hall.

Genocide is as vast a topic as it is an intractable problem, yet fortunately, our two speakers on Thursday’s “Writing Genocide” panel brought a particular viewpoint that is not often enough discussed: the psychology of the perpetrators.

Lieve Joris’s novel, The Rebels’ Hour, traces the life of Assani, a young cowherd who “learns that he is ethnically Tutsi; though uninterested in politics or military life, he is forced to take sides in the bloody conflict rocking the Congo in the wake of the Rwandan genocide…. he becomes a fearsome rebel leader. With his cadre of child soldiers he traverses the war-ravaged country…”

The approach for this discussion was for each author to begin by commenting on the other’s book. Christian Jungersen, the Danish author most recently of The Exception, was a bit shocked, it seems, at the empathy he felt with this character Assani, and with good reason. How can we feel anything for murderers? “When I read this book,” he said, “I thought, this could be me!” A nuanced view is important, but sympathy is dangerous territory where we “risk not condeming as we should.”

But it turns out this is territory Jungersen is familiar with. His novel explorers the ironic position of employees of a think tank who, while researching and writing about genocide, turn against one another, thus exposing the potential for multiplicity and evil that all of us may have within. In fact, later in response to a question about those normal people who resist the pressure of becoming someone like Assani, Jungersen asserted that it’s not the sweet-hearted people you might think; those are the very ones that the genocidal process nourishes because of its emphasis on emotion in order to motivate people. It is often, according to what he found researching his novel, those people on the margins, a little off of society who are most apt to not fall into the trap.

An underlying issue in the emotional tug towards violence is racism, and while not addressed here by name it was certainly a theme in the discussion. In Joris’s book, the character Assani grew up in an area where tribes were kept apart because of their marriage practices. It is this sort of exclusion (racism in my vocabulary) that creates an environment that can lead to violence, in part, Ms. Joris explains, because it makes perpetrators feel like victims. This is a particular emphasis of hers as she felt it was important to go back in her character’s life to when he was innocent.

Jungersen’s novel, while set in the workplace and not in the killing fields, explores similar terrain where one’s environment can change them. He said that with this novel he wanted to explore how the dynamic of the office “makes me mean.”

These complexity of emotions are probably best conveyed in art, which is why this discussion, spilling into an extra half-hour from schedule, was so intelligent: both writers knew their topic from research, yet if there were “experts” on the panel we would have been wrapped in definition rather than exploration. At one point, Jungersen demurred from answering the question of just what genocide is by pointing out the specificity and legality surrounding the term (issues that probably don’t serve the problem very well anyway).

There was also some discussion of writing. Joris, who characterized her book as a baby, spent years (6, I believe) researching the novel, yet found it very difficult to write. She ended up spending 9 months working in a monastery to get it finished. Jungersen was very curious about whether or not Joris was exhausted from such arduous research and if she’d be writing more about the Congo (about which this is her third book). She’s moved on, it turns out, to Asia, but still exploring similar topics.

Jungersen, for his part, declared that he was done writing about Genocide. While admiring greatly those who devote their lives to making the world a better place, he, as he said early on, is driven to write.

Call me shallow, but after a while you come to realize that to wade through the seaweed of books you have to be able to make necessarily quick judgements based on whatever criteria before you. That might be pink jacket covers (mentioned here already) or sometimes even the press clippings. Tonight’s email from the NY Times Book Review (with, I might add, some encouraging coverage of Chinese literature), included this bit (see image) and I instantly hated it. First, it’s a Marion Ettlinger photograph and I have such dislike of her morbidly stylized photography that that alone is enough to turn me off. The rest, well, you can see the one line description the Times put up, which is either just non-creative or meant to doom the book because if that’s all that’s there is then this is such well-trod territory that it doesn’t seem worth bothering.

I once said about Sony’s fairly weak entrant into the e-book field that we were still pretty far from a device that would change the way people read, but if Apple designed an e-book then all bets were off. While that doesn’t seem too likely given Steve Job’s comments about Americans not reading, it appears that Amazon’s Kindle is another matter.

On Amazon’s home page today I see reports that they’ve not been able to keep them in stock but have increased production to meet demand. That of course could have been due to very low initial expectations for the product, but if there’s demand now at $400 then there could very will be a lot of demand as the market expands to other players. I think the hook is connectivity. While Sony’s product offered a limited universe and limited connectivity (I don’t think I could have used the product on my Mac, at least when I checked early on), Amazon’s product will quickly grow.

Online reading is getting better too. If you’re on a Mac, check out Times a new feed reader that looks like it may bridge the gap between “traditional” feed readers with their many panes and buttons and the experience of reading a newspaper. Times is for Leopard only, by the way and was just released today so I haven’t given it a thorough work out, but I know that as I replace reading print periodicals with their online counterparts (see my earlier pledge on this), I’m going to want a way to keep up with it all and in a uniformly easy interface, something that most online magazines have yet to figure out on their own.

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